


The Kids Are Not All Right

by galaxyknights



Category: The Darkest Minds Series - Alexandra Bracken, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2014-10-26
Packaged: 2018-02-22 18:30:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2517584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galaxyknights/pseuds/galaxyknights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Piper McClean hasn't seen another kid in three years. She remembers the last time clearly. Her only friend getting shot in the head by soldiers. By soldiers who have been specially trained to deal with children and the all psychic powers they've been cursed with. // The first time Nico di Angelo sees Hazel, he thinks she's a ghost. In a camp like Asphodel, where death reeked in every corner and the garden grows fat off the bloated bodies of the dead, he wasn't surprised. When she told him she wanted to escape, that's when he was surprised. // Jason can’t remember anything but his name when he wakes up in Wilderness Camp. He doesn’t know why his headaches make him dream of murder, or why a kid called Leo keeps trailing after him like a shadow. // Frank Zhang is a soldier, through and through. For the Children’s League, he’s ran more successful missions than any other PSI kid. But what can he do when the people who saved his life ask him to take another? // A story about death and telekinesis and trying to be a kid in a world where all kids are enemies of the state. (The Darkest Minds AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. CHAPTER ONE

**CHAPTER ONE**

_Oklahoma_

Piper McClean hasn’t seen another child in three years.

She remembers the last time very clearly. There was a little girl who was the daughter of her father’s friend. Her name was Kelly. She had blond hair tied in pigtails with sparkling bobbles, a look that was little too young for someone already eleven years old. Piper didn’t much like Kelly, but there were no other children so they played together anyways. Kelly always wanted to play at Piper’s house because her father was rich and Piper had better toys.

Kelly wasn’t like Piper. Kelly could look at things and move them, and when she did it she scrunched up her nose like she was concentrating really hard. Piper told Kelly that all kids could do things special. That’s why they were taken away. That’s why they had to go to the camps, because grownups were afraid of them. Kelly shook her head.

“It’s cause they’re sick,” she argued. “That’s what the T.V. says. They have to go to camps to get better! You’re so stupid. Don’t you pay attention?”

“Are you sick? Am I sick?” Piper asked.

“You make me sick. But you can’t do anything special like me, so I guess not,” Kelly accused.

Piper almost laughed. “I can do things too,” Piper said. “Different things.”

“Like what?”

Piper narrowed her eyes at Kelly. “I can make people do whatever I want.”

Kelly looked scared, “No you cannot. Only grownups are in charge like that.”

How could a girl the same age as Piper act like such a dumb little kid?

“I’ll show you,” Piper grinned.

Kelly shook her head, her eyes wide, “No. I believe you. I don’t want to see.”

Piper just laughed, and said, “It’ll be fun! Now _bark like a dog!_ ”

Her voice changed at the end. It sparked through the air, and buzzed across the whole room. Kelly’s pupils dilated. She started barking.

Piper laughed. She never got to play with her powers. They made her dad nervous so she tried not to, but if she held it in too long she started getting headaches. Controlling Kelly now felt right. It felt like she’d been holding her breath for days and finally let it out.

“Stop!” Piper shouted, even though they were supposed to keep quiet. “Okay now _walk around on all fours. Keep barking!_ ”

Kelly’s bottom lip quivered as she went down on hands and knees and started barking and scrambling around.

Piper doubled over in laughter. “Stop!” She clutched her stomach as her body shook with giggles.

Kelly started to cry, “What did you do! You’re horrible! You’re a monster! A freak! You- You-,” she struggled for words, “You smelly redskin!”

“Wha-,“ Piper felt a sudden flame in her chest. She’d grown up with those words being slung at her from every direction.  But then everyone else died and they didn’t call her names anymore. She thought she’d heard the last of them. She stopped laughing.

Kelly turned away. Piper called after her, “Where are you going?”

Kelly turned back, pigtails flying, bobbles smacking against her red cheek with a jerk, “I have to throw up. I’m going to the bathroom.”

Piper felt a dark feeling creep up on her. She locked eyes with Kelly and said calmly, “ _You’re a dog, remember? Dogs use the yard_.”

Kelly’s expression drew blank as the words washed over her. She went to the door and walked out in the yard.

And two men passed by on the street just as Kelly squatted down. Piper watched from the window. There was nothing she could do. If she yelled after Kelly they would both get caught.

The men had ψ symbols on their sleeves. Psi Special Forces. They were looking for kids. And they’d found one.

As soon as Kelly saw them she tried to run, and the rest seemed to happen in slow motion. The men chased after and caught up within seconds. They grabbed at her arms and started speaking harshly, spittle twinkling as it left their bitter tongues, and when Kelly immediately broke into hysterical sobs, they hit her. She screamed louder, and Piper could hear it piercing the air even through the barrier of the window. Her breath fogged up a little patch on the glass because she hadn’t moved, so she stood on her tip toes. 

Piper couldn’t see, but as Kelly went still Piper imagined her nose scrunching up. One of the men looked at the other and made an annoyed face. Even when a big rock started floating up, they didn’t look scared. They just looked angry. One pulled the rifle from his back.

He flipped the safety.

And he shot Kelly in the face.

The rock collapsed at the exact same time that her body crumpled to the ground.

 

Piper McClean hasn’t seen another child in three years.

Every single one she’s ever known is dead. Kelly wasn’t even the first one she watched die. In school, before they all closed up, there were two girls who collapsed on the playground, twins, within moments of each other. One second they were swinging on the monkey bars, and the next second they were on the ground.

First they called it Everhart’s Disease, after Michael Everhart, some kid out East who was the first to die. But then they switched to IAAN: Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration. Which was a fancy way of saying if you’re under twelve years old, your brain will melt in your head like a marshmallow dropped in a campfire. First it’s happy and fresh and then it’s black and shriveled and then before you can blink, it’s gone. There’re no symptoms. There’s no cure. 99.9958% contagion rate.

One day Piper did enough math to know that meant there were less than 250,000 kids left in the States.

Well, after Kelly died, less than 249,999 kids left.

And now it’s just Piper. Alone in her father’s second house, out in the desert, on the outskirts of the reserve.

 

-<>-

_Georgia_

The first time Nico saw Hazel, he thought she was a ghost. Nico has a lot of experience with ghosts, because he’s haunted by his sister and by his mom. He can tell ghosts apart from real people because he hears all the thoughts and desires of every real person bombarding him all the time. Ghosts are quiet, so he likes them better. Hazel’s quiet.

He didn’t know her name at first, of course, he wouldn’t until much later, when she whispered, “Hazel, I think.”

“Do you have a last name, Hazel?” he would ask just as softly, so as not to spook her like you might spook a wild hare.

Hazel paused. “I don’t know,” she would say, “I don’t remember.”

In most camps, boys and girls aren’t allowed to talk, but Nico was stuffed into one of the later establishments—an abandoned middle school they renamed Asphodel like some sick joke as they threw a bunch of survivors into it, surrounded them with guns, and grew a barb wire fence around the edges. Nico remembered living in Italy, when he was very young, and sometimes he pretended the fences were just unusual grape vines, the jagged spears just unfriendly fruit.

One day the last Yellow at Asphodel tried to hop the fence in the middle of the night, and all Nico saw of the event after the shots were fired were wine-dark stains dripping down his metal grapes.

But Hazel wasn’t a Yellow. She wasn’t whatever Nico was. She was a Blue, not that it mattered. The only thing that would get a bullet in the back of your head faster than trying to climb the fence was trying to use your powers.

Still, Nico could tell she was Blue even without watching her move things around without touching them, because they label everyone with bright colored X’s on the back of their grey jumpsuits, like a some emergency threat level system warning you how terrified you should be of any particular child. So she was Blue. And according to his X, he was a safe, easy to manage Green.

Everyone at Asphodel has a story to tell. Because it’s an overflow camp, they were all from the last few round ups, or else caught in the bleak-years like Nico was.

Nico decided right after he felt her empty mind that he wanted to know Hazel’s story. The other kids— with their tales of protective parents trying to shelter them despite the warnings from the government, or action-packed epics of fighting off hordes of PSFs before being overwhelmed by sheer force—didn’t interest him. But Hazel, with her strange yellow eyes and soul as clear as the night sky—it’s her story Nico wants to know.

Whether for that reason or else sheer boredom, he sort of takes the younger girl under his wing. She doesn’t look younger by much, though; although one day she confesses she doesn’t know how old she is, either. When he tells her the date it was when he was captured six months ago, she lets out a soft, resigned sigh, and says, “Thirteen, then.”

“Well I’m fourteen. I’ll be like your older brother, okay? I’m going to take care of you,” he replies, and Hazel’s brown face does something close enough to a smile that it makes Nico’s heart leap.

 

-<>-

 

_New York_

“Maybe we should stop for directions,” Percy says, voice even.

Annabeth turns to him abruptly, nearly swerving the car with a jerking movement on the wheel. “Absolutely not.”

“Hey, hey, watch the road! I’d hate to let some shmuck lose the chance of killing me by getting splattered across a freeway first.”

She turns back, but her flint-colored eyes are still glaring and the set of her shoulders still wary.

Where Percy is distrustful from experience, his companion comes by it naturally. Paired with their latest predicament, even daring to stop at a rest area and steal a map in the dark hours of pre-dawn seems like too great a risk.

“You grew up in New York, though, right?” she asks again, for the sixth time. “Doesn’t anything look familiar, yet?”

Percy shrugs, “I grew up in Manhattan, not Upstate. We weren’t really the road trip type.”

“It would be a lot more helpful if you had been,” Annabeth sighs. To last this long these days, a person’s nerves have to be made of steel, but it’s obvious hers are wearing thin, so he tries to think of something helpful. Unfortunately thinking isn’t really his strong suit.

“He wanted to take us to the River, right? East River? So we should head towards the Hudson.”

“Too easy. If the PSFs were going to look for a place called ‘river,’ picking the biggest river in the region isn’t keeping under the radar.” Her hands are tight on the wheel, knuckles turning white. “But we can’t just wander around like sheep. We’re bound to be spotted out in the open like this.”

“Why only five colors, do you think? Your Green smartness and my Blue telekinesis aren’t nearly as helpful as Purple invisibility or like, Brown Superspeed would be.”

Annabeth doesn’t even bother looking at him. “Do you even care about Grover?”

Percy sighs. “Of course I do. I just don’t think freaking out 24/7 is going to do anything good for your sanity. Trying to take the edge off and all that…”

“Well it’s not working. We just need a plan, and then we can worry about mental health afterwards.”

“No, come on, the whole point is to _worry less_.”

Annabeth’s grip loosens slightly, but her posture stays tight. “I get what you’re saying. But letting our guard down is the first thing that’s going to get us caught and thrown back into Yancy.”

A pause, and the soft melodies of classic rock streaming through the radio are the only sound. “Okay. A plan. We’ll go to New York. See if we can’t find some friendlies, and look for more clues there.”

“Seems like a pretty shitty plan.”

Percy just looked at her through the corner of his eyes, and said, “Perfect. It’ll match our shitty life, then.”

 

-<>-

 

_California_

Frank isn’t like the others. He loves working for the Children’s League.

The thing is, before the CL, he had nothing. He was smart, sure, but all Greens are smart. And they’re the easiest to come by. An Orange, now they’re useful. And Reds…well they were mostly just terrifying—especially to Frank, who had an unnatural aversion to fire. But Reds probably would have been useful if they hadn’t all been offed like cattle in the first couple years after IAAN hit the countryside.

But when he joined up with the CL, he found out he wasn’t just good at spelling and fractions. Frank is a warrior, blood and bone.

“ _Daaaayum_ ,” Dakota throws his arm around Frank’s shoulders just after the last shot hits its bullseye. “Why aren’t _you_ team leader again?”

“I don’t think I have the charisma that you do, Kota,” Frank admitted with a sad smile.

“Good point,” Dakota smiles, his mouth red as blood, teeth stained pink, and his words are slurred (and therefore not particularly uplifting) when he says, “But one day, buddy, you’ll be the best of us.”

Frank sighs. “I wish I could use a bow instead. I had one when I was kid and it was awesome.”

“Well, maybe if we ever storm a medieval castle you can play archer, but right now we need a sharpshooter and rifles are the best we’ve got,” Reyna says as she pulls off her standard-issue shooting earmuffs.

Reyna is a team leader, too, and one of the best Blues the CL has ever had. Her cool exterior makes her seem otherworldly, and her immense beauty makes her seem somewhat divine. Frank’s always felt a sort of attraction towards her, one that he can’t really explain. One day another one of the Greens, a kid called 8bit, had said, “It’s like she’s part goddess, you know? I wanna build her a temple and worship at it.” Another had said, “I just want mack with her, honestly.” To which the first replied, “Dude, she’d probably bite off your tongue.”

“Dakota, could you take this to Octavian?” she asks, pulling a manila folder out of her pack.

“Don’t you see him more often than I do?”

“Technically. But I’m busy right now.”

Dakota leans in conspiratorially, “What’s the count?”

Reyna can’t hide her laugh, so she just turns away, her dark braid gliding over her shoulder as she says in monotone, “Three days. It’s a good streak and I want to break my record.” She doesn’t turn back before she leaves.

Frank raised an eyebrow at his friend, “What was that about?”

Dakota giggles, “Oh, she’s just been trying to avoid that rat-faced creep for like, a month. I think he tried to put the moves on her, but I’m not one to gossip. You’d think guys would take the ‘cold bitch’ front as a warning, but I guess when Golden Boy left he thought there was an opening.”

“Doesn’t she live in the room next to his, though? How can you not see your own neighbor for three days?”

Dakota grabs his own pack from the grey lockers beside the door, and says, “It’s worth the challenge. Speaking of which,” he gives a wicked grin, and slaps the folder to Frank’s chest, “Could you pass this on to him?”

“Ah, yeah,” Frank says softly. And then, because Dakota is the only one he really feels the courage to joke with, “Have you got a count, too?”

“Two days!”

\--

“Ah, excuse me,” Frank clears his throat.

“You’re excused,” the blond boy says, his fingers tapping furiously at the keyboard in front of him. Octavian is of the more technologically-inclined Greens, whereas Frank’s talents lie more in memorization and other useless areas.

Frank sets down the folder, “This is from Reyna.”

Octavian barely glances up from his screen. “Right. Thanks, Dakota.”

“Oh, uh, I’m Frank.”

Now he turns fully, “Huh? Oh, sorry. You two look a lot alike.”

“What?” Frank says.

“Yeah, I mean, you’re both tall, and you’ve got black hair.”

“I’m Chinese.”

Octavian glares a little, “Well excuse me—I don’t really see race.”

Frank’s eyebrows draw in, incredulous. “How can you not see that I’m Chinese?”

“How can _you_ not see that I have more important things to do than dawdle with an oaf?” he turns back to his computer in a huff, and Frank leaves as fast as he can, cheeks red with embarrassment. Why does he bother talking?

Warrior, blood and bone? Yeah right, he thinks, as he made his way back to his room. Oaf is definitely more like it.

 

-<>-

 

_Arizona_

The sky is blue.

The sky is blue and the ground is red.

The sky is blue and the ground is red and Jason’s head is the bright white flare of _pain._

There is only the colors and the pain, and then

then

there is nothing.


	2. CHAPTER TWO

**CHAPTER TWO**

_Oklahoma_

Before the little house in the desert, Piper and her father lived in Los Angeles, near Hollywood. The reasons they moved were two-fold.

First off, the bombs.

After the UN placed economic sanctions on the United States following the default of the federal debt, riots broke out across the nation. First, government relied on local police alone on to break up individual mobs, but the violence escalated so quickly that within a month the National Guard, and then the Army, had to step in to enforce martial law.

The situation grew so tremendous that the state of California decided to take its wealth and run, and used all the big money stock-piled in Silicon Valley to barricade the border and build an army of its own.

Around that time the rioters in LA started setting off bombs, first in government buildings, and then in all the wealthier districts in an attempt to scare the money out of people’s pockets.  

In addition to the local brutality, the United States and the newly seceded Federal Coalition, without actually declaring war, squabbled in the most dangerous way—with bullets and gunpowder and fire. They wanted to scare, too, but the preferred currency was bodies.

The bombs weren’t just in LA, but in Washington D.C., too. After the rebels of the Federal Coalition attacked the White House, President Jove went into hiding like a snake retreating into a hole. Everyone was scared, of IAAN, and poverty, and each other. And nobody had to think about the children, because they were all dead.    

\--

Secondly, Piper started stealing.

In the midst of all the chaos, Tristan McLean, beloved celebrity heart-throb, panty moistener of women across the world, found himself rarely at home. Having no wife, that only person who could mind was his young daughter, who he was hiding like a weapon, which is not at all an unfair comparison.

But Piper was only twelve, and she didn’t understand why her father, her only social contact, couldn’t make more time for her. So she did it partly for attention. But she also did it partly for the thrill.

She put thick, baggy clothes to hide her slender body. She wore sunglasses to mask her child’s eyes. And she left the quarantine of the house when he father was away one day, walked with confidence to make up for LA’s lack of shadows, and traipsed into the corner store.

It wasn’t hard, stealing. All Piper had to do was tell the clerk behind the counter that it didn’t matter.

“ _These are my things. I’m just picking them up. Don’t worry about it. I was never here._ ”

And because she said it, it was true.

So when she escalated over a month into bigger items, when she found herself driving a bright red Lexus out of the dealership while the salesman smiled and waved after her dreamily, she didn’t feel any guilt. Because using her powers felt so good, and being outside talking to unsuspecting strangers was better than waiting at home with the curtains drawn for her father to come in the door.

The grin on her face was as wide as the ocean, and she crashed like a wave into the beached rioters who swarmed the car, mouths foaming with rage against some unnamed machine.

Fear hit fast and hard, and Piper didn’t notice the flare-up of her power until all around her there was a calm. Had she spoken? Had the scream in her mind escaped her lips?

The rioters stopped banging their fists against the glass and metal, stopped shouting vitriol. The adrenaline bursting out of her veins gave her unfamiliar strength, and between sobs she bent their minds backwards, because she had them now, all of them, her power in their minds like hooks in the mouths of fish. There was a mutual exhale of breath as several lost consciousness and collapsed to the ground.

Piper didn’t know what to do, so she ran. Pushed open the door and climbed over and under grown-ups who looked at her with blank, empty expressions. But she forgot to pull her hood up, and it wasn’t long before someone recognized her for a child and she was dragged by the collar into the back of a police car.

“What color are you?” the police officer asked her, but she didn’t know what that meant and the adrenaline was wearing out so she just wiped at her face with her hands, but they came away bloody and it only scared her more.

“Does she look familiar to you?” one officer asked another.

There was a pause of consideration. “Yeah, you know, isn’t she Tristan McLean’s daughter? Money like that, no wonder he got away with hiding her this long.”

“A man like that would pay a pretty penny to whoever brought her back to him, don’t you think?” They were sitting up front in the unmoving car, and Piper closed her eyes and focused on the sounds.

“I don’t want to mess around any of the freaks. And god damn Rick, she’s covered in blood. And you think we should fucking give her back to her dad?”

“It’s a nosebleed, dumbass. She just smeared it around. And I’m not saying give, I’m saying return in exchange for compensation.”

“I stil—“

“ALL UNITS TO SANTA MONICA AND GOWER. ALL UNITS TO SANTA MONICA AND GOWER. PUBLIC DISTRUBANCE RESULTING IN UNKNOWN NUMBER OF INJURED. 3 LANES CLOSED.”

“Another riot?”

“Of course another riot. Just another drop in the bucket. So no one would notice if we went over to Brush Canyon and dropped our young friend off.”

“You really think it would work?”

“Would you rather go handcuff some rioters and never find out?”

There was another pause. “Fine. But if she pulls some psycho shit I’m not too good to use you as a human shield.”

\--

Three hours later when her father came home and the officers escorted him to the car to retrieve Piper, they smiled at each other sideways and patted pockets newly filled.

Tristan cleaned off Piper’s face with a wet rag and made a decision. “We have to get you out of here.”

\--

Instead of seeing her father rarely, now she seems him never. Instead of stealing, she can only get her cheap thrills from the enormous stack of DVDs piled next to the flat screen TV. Over and over again, she watches Jason Statham and Matt Damon defeat the Bad Guy and even though she knows the world isn’t black and white, evil and innocent, it’s nice to pretend for a small amount of time every day that all her problems could be solved and wrapped up in the span of two hours.

There are a lot of silver linings. Piper is not in a camp. Piper is healthy, well-fed, and not lacking means of entertainment.

But she’s still miserable.

Because alive is something, but living is something else.

 

-<>-

_Georgia_

The days blend together in camp with miraculous surety. Red dirt and red days slide together until whole weeks drip past, then months in a torrent, until you wake up and the only significant memory of this segment of your life is the moment you looked down and realized how much longer your own legs were. Is the ground lower down? How did you not notice?

For Hazel, though, life before the camp isn’t that much more distinct. Flash-backward through her life, and there is that same streak of red stretching like a road, but the difference is jagged hooks of memories that snag the mind. They are bright diamonds in the ground that she is terrified to pick up. Shining, promising to be the answer to all her questions about where she came from.

But the very first time she picked one up—reached out and grasped the star-bright gleam of memory, the curse awoke. Cursed diamonds, she would think to herself. Pick them up and you only get hurt.

And so she learned to ignore them. To ignore most things: the nagging pain of headaches drifting through her skull, the salacious glare of the PSF who guards her and the other Blues from Cabin 13, the sound of the other girls sobbing into their beds at night.

If things were different, she would be too. They all would. And whatever happened to Hazel—whatever made those diamonds and scattered them in the barren red of her brain—made it even worse.

“I think you’re kind. I think when we get out of here, you’ll get the chance to see,” Nico whispers. They aren’t supposed to be talking, but the staff of Asphodel don’t care as much as they’re paid to. They were the last to be rounded up, too, just like the kids they’re guarding. Men and women who had no choice after the economy collapsed but to turn to soldier work if they wanted to keep their stomachs full.

“I don’t know about that,” Hazel answers back even quieter. Her New Orleans accent is obvious even in the softest tones. How did she get all the way to Georgia? All the other kids have typical Georgia accents—practically Midwestern. Her voice only makes her differences more obvious, her mysteries more prevalent, and so she speaks even less than the kids are usually allowed.

“I’m sure of it. I saw you give your bread to that other girl at your table. You didn’t have to,” Nico points out.

Hazel shrugs, “She was hungry. I wasn’t. That’s not kind, that’s common sense.”

“Modest, too. You might be a saint.”

Hazel nearly sighs, “You make me want to be mean just to prove you wrong.”

“Aversion to authority,” he says, “How’d you last in here, again?”

“You’re not authority.”

“I’m your big brother!”

Hazel narrows her eyes at him. It’s so strange, not being able to hear her thoughts. To not know exactly what she’s thinking. The other kids think she’s an enigma (he can tell because he can hear _them_ think it), but they have no idea. She is so much like the ghosts.

“Is there something special I should call you? Bro?”

“Nah.”

“Nah.”

 

-<>-

 

_New York_

Before they hit the New York City limits, Percy pulls the car to the side of the road. Their beat up laundry-blue Ford fits right in with the other derelict cars collapsed on the freeway.

“This would be so much easier if you could grow facial hair,” Annabeth sighs. “At least then one of us could pass for an adult.”

Percy scoffs, then reaches over to scratch at Annabeth’s chin. “Rude. And sexist. You could grow a beard for the sake of the team, too, you know.”

“The two of us aren’t a team.” She bats his hand away.

“With Grover we were a team,” he says.

She looks away, “Yeah.”

 

-<>-

 

_California_

The difference between the PSI kids and the CL soldiers is distinct if only for the height differences. If you see someone short, they’re probably a kid, and so they’re definitely dangerous.

But there are also other differences, ones that you can’t see just from the surface. They wear the same uniforms, but they hold different ranks. None of the PSI kids are allowed to help run the show. They’re just pawns with powers, really, and the Children’s League, despite its name, likes to keep its children in check.

 

-<>-

 

_Arizona_

“Dude. Are you okay?” Leo whispers.

The kid across from him opens his eyes slowly. Flutters them closed again. Blood is still dribbling from his ears and nose.

“ _Ffffffffuc--,”_ he moans, rolling into his arms to keep his brain from falling out.

“Shut up!” Leo whisper-screams. “Are you trying to phone home? You’re loud enough hail the aliens. I’m not sayin’ I don’t care what happens to you, but it’s my head on the line here, too. So if you don’t mind, keep your death-moans to a reasonable low wail.”

Jason opens his eyes slowly, the light was causing spears of pain to shoot through his head. “I don’t know you.”

Leo pouts his lower lip out, “Rude, man, maybe I’m your best friend.”

Jason covers his eyes again, unable to handle the stimuli of sound and light at the same time. “What?”

“Just kiddin’ ya, I’ve never seen your lily-white ass in my life.”

Jason just blinks. “You’re really weird.”

Leo sighs and lays his head down on the pillow, “Yeah, I get that a lot.”

Without warning, a woman walks into the room. “Jason, did I hear you waking up?”

Jason doesn’t answer. Just tries with great effort not to whimper at the pain still aching through his skull.

The woman, who has dark hair, warm skin, and lipstick stains on her front teeth, sits on the stool near his bed. “My name is Juno. I’ve just got to ask you some simple questions, okay Jason?”

“Okay. Can I get something for my head first? With water? I can’t even think,” he admits.

“Sure,” she says with a stained smile, “I’ll see what I can rustle up.”

Jason leans back down as she walks away, and peers through his fingers at the room. It’s a hospital, or else something a lot like one. The IV taped along his hand and forearm limits his mobility somewhat, but he can’t imagine trying to move very far right now anyway.

“Are you pretending to be asleep?” he asks the prone form of his roommate.

“I can’t answer because I’m asleep,” Leo answers, half his face pressed into a pillow.

“You’re not fooling anybody, kid,” Juno says as she reenters with a cup of water in one hand. “Here you go, Jason,” she smiles again, and the corners of her mouth fold into place like well-worn leather. She extends the cup and a few small blue pills, and it’s all Jason can do not to seem too eager. 

“You seem nice enough, why are you working for devil’s spawn?” Leo says, tongue in cheek.

Juno just glances at him with a sorry frown, but doesn’t reply. To Jason, she asks, “How are you feeling?”

“My head is killing me, and I’m having trouble remembering things,” he answers.

Juno makes an interested noise and writes something down. “What sort of things are you having trouble remembering?”

“Where I am.”

Juno’s smile is saccharine. “You’re in Wilderness Camp, of course. You’re sick, and so we’re here to help you overcome your disease.”

“My disease?”

“You don’t remember that, either?”

“I don’t remember anything. Just my name,” Jason looks at the IV again. The drip is incessant; it’s ringing in his ears. Beyond the dulling ache of his head, there is an overwhelming sense of weakness.

“IAAN, of course. You’re a Yellow, Jason. Do you understand what that means?”

There is a piercing pain again, like a fist punching through glass, and he sees sparks. Remembers lightning. Electricity.

“Yes.”

“It means you’re a danger to yourself, Jason. And to others. So you’re at Wilderness to help rehabilitate you. Do you know how long you’ve been here?” she is still writing on her papers, although Jason’s vision is blurring.

“Maybe a day?” he can’t recall anything before waking up in the room. He can’t remember anything before the IV.

Now Juno’s smile is apologetic. “Four years, Jason. You’ve been here for four years.”

“What happened to me?” Jason’s voice has an edge now. Fear, maybe? Four years? Then Jason realizes he doesn’t even know how old he is.

Juno glances down at her papers, “We were testing out a new frequency of Calm Control. It’s a nonviolent pitch-emitter that can be broadcast through loudspeakers in times of unrest among the camp. This new version appears to have had some ill effects on several children.”

“What happened?” a muted panic is rising in his chest, suppressed by the numb blanket of the IV.

“There were a few fatalities. You were very lucky, Jason. You’re very lucky to have made it this far,” she is staring right at him, now. Her voice is light, but her expression is unyielding. There is something in her eyes that makes his head hurt more. Something that makes him want to curl up and crawl away. Her next sentence is a command, “Don’t forget why you’re here, Jason.”

And then she is smiling again, and the moment is gone. “Well, it looks like I’ve got everything I need. Get some rest. There’s lot of work to be done to keep the camp running, and we’ve got to keep these beds free.”


End file.
